First up, we've got the QooQi, which is a simple device for your desk to organize cables. You have to watch the video to understand how it works, but it's a very simple and intuitive way of organizing your cables and keeping them in order. It has a nano pad on the bottom to help it stick to flat surfaces easily.

The project is already just slightly over its $10,000 goal, and has more than three weeks to go, so chances are it will get at least double the goal.

Next up, we've got the Kordl, which is a very, very simple plastic device that connects to your headphones to keep them from getting tangled. It doesn't tie them up entirely, but rather just connects the two ends to each other, which prevents tangling. As they explain, they're using the "rubber band vs. spaghetti theory" in that single strands, such as spaghetti, get easily tangled and tied up, where as loops, like rubber bands, tend not to get as tangled (they haven't seen my rubber band drawer... ).

This one is also well past its target of $7,500, with about two more weeks to go. Personally, $5 for such a simple bit of plastic seemed a bit on the steep side, but I'm sure people sick of tangled ear bud cables might find it worth it to avoid the annoying process of untangling.

If the Kordl isn't really what you're looking for, there's an alternative, called Loop for organizing a variety of cables, including ear buds, but also power cables, USB cables and more. It's also a fairly simple concept, but executed nicely. Basically a simple attachment to the cable that makes it easy to wrap up our cables when you're done. My Thinkpad power cable comes with a similar velcro strip, and I always wondered why so few cables came with something similar, so the Loop looks like an easy way to retrofit other cables to do the same sort of thing.

This one has only raised about $1,000 out of $5,000 targeted, but there's still a month to go. Again, the pricing here seems slightly high -- $10 for two -- when it feels more like $10 should get you a pack of four or five of these things, but again perhaps I underestimate the demand and the production costs. One other oddity, it appears there's a nearly identical campaign to the Kickstarter campaign, except it's over at IndieGoGo, and it's raised no money at all, with just a week to go. It's not unheard of to see projects appear on both major crowdfunding platforms but it does seem like a relatively rare occurrence. Even more bizarre: the pricing is more expensive on IndieGoGo. No wonder it has no buyers while Kickstarter at least has a few.

That's all for this week. Stay organized.

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]]>wires wires everywherehttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130817/01521524217Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:05:00 PDTReaders Want Context and Organization, Not Just 'Content'Timothy Leehttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080609/1105121347.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080609/1105121347.shtmlI wrote last fall that the New York Times was finally starting to get the web, and I think the Washington Post is in the same category of taking the web a lot more seriously than it did a few years ago. But although the biggest newspapers are now taking the challenge seriously, they still have work to do. Case in point: the Washington, DC, area had a big storm a while back, and Scott Karp went to the Washington Post website expecting (reasonably enough) to find information about it. Unfortunately, despite being a DC-based publication, the Post's home page had very little information about the storm. Indeed, the home page wouldn't have mentioned it at all if there didn't happen to be a story on the most-read articles list. Unfortunately it was a formulaic story from the print edition that was great for a non-Washingtonian who doesn't know anything about the storm, but it's not terribly useful to a Washingtonian who can see the storm happening outside his window. What locals need is detailed, real-time information. After seeing nothing relevant on the WaPo's website, he went over to Google, typed in "power outages in northern virginia," and the first hit was a page from Dominion Electric showing power outages around its service region. Karp went back to the Post's website, and after more searching finally found a blog focusing on DC area weather—precisely the sort of thing that the Post ought to be making more prominently displayed during major weather events.

I think there are a couple of lessons to be learned from this. First, as Mike has said before, good content is often less important than useful services like organizing and filtering information. The Post had the content Karp wanted -- an up-to-date blog and links to useful resources -- but because its website was poorly organized, he wasn't able to find it easily. Some newspapers claim that Google lives parasitically off of other content producers, but I think this is a good illustration of why that's not true; there was plenty of content out there, but without Google, Karp might not have been able to find it. The other problem is that for all of the Post's progress it still seems to regard itself largely as a newspaper that happens to publish its articles on the web, rather than a general media company that happens to publish a paper edition. Sometimes a traditional newspaper article is the best way to cover a story, but often (as in this case) it's not. The Post, like a lot newspaper outlets, still seems to put too much emphasis on its print content, even in circumstances were a shorter, timelier, and more densely-linked story would be more useful to readers.